The most telling thing about the exchange between Barney Frank and a conservative student (which I blogged about yesterday and which has been making the roundsof the rightosphere) questioning him in a public forum at Harvard is how quick the Massachusetts Democrat is to attack.

How dare someone pose such a tough question! How dare someone ask him to consider if he might have done something wrong. Barney’s used to getting softball questions from an adoring media. Tough questions mean someone <strike>is</strike> must be accusing him! They’re part of some nefarious right-wing plot!

The Congressman accuses the student of “making an accusation which is totally inaccurate” and asks him to suggest what he, the Congressman, should have done. That very response showed his arrogance. He acted as if he never erred, well only once, just that one time when he took some bad advice. That he would ask someone else to suggest his errors suggests a man who rarely, if at all, engages in any sort of introspection, rarely considers if he had done anything wrong.

His failure to address his misdeeds is particularly telling given his repeated defenses over the years of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) whose failure sparked the financial meltdown.

Instead of even considering if he had made errors over the years*, Barney rambles on about a “systematic right-wing attack to try and divert the blame for the deregulation.” It’s all the right-wing, isn’t it Barney? He doesn’t acknowledge his own failure to support (indeed, his active opposition to) increased regulation of the GSEs.

When I posted on Barney’s failure to acknowledge his mistakes (more that just a failure to acknowledge his mistakes, a failure to even consider if he had made any), a critic was quick to chime in that I was pushing a debunked myth. He linked a post on the Community Reinvestment Act, something I didn’t even address in the post. He then went out to attack Republicans.

In short, just like Barney at Harvard, this reader didn’t address the substance of the “question,” (well, in the reader’s case, the post) but was quick to attack his ideological adversaries.

No wonder the unhappy Mr. Frank is such a hero to the left. Just like all too many of our critics who ignore the points of our posts and attack us instead, the mean-spirited man from Massachusetts ignores the question, accuses the person posing it and goes on a tear against the “right-wing.”

You think a guy so smart would relish such a challenge. You’d hope that a guy so powerful would be able to acknowledge his mistakes.

*Recall how, in 2004, the media was in a tizzy when then-President Bush wouldn’t admit to making mistakes in Iraq.

And yet the voters of Massachusetts keep sending him back and sending him back and sending him back. That is why this country is in an irreversible tailspin, no matter how arrogant or corrupt Frank is, his district will keep sending him back and their is nothing anyone else can do about it. This country is screwed.

History is smothered with the ultimate examples of people who refuse to even consider the possibility of a mistake. Each and every one of these people have come to miserable ends. At best, they caused catastrophic damage to themselves and others, and the more powerful they were, the larger the number of people who suffered. At worst, they came to truly horrible ends, and their names are now reviled and despised.

Example: when Wales was annexed by England, the longbow became the standard missile weapon of English armies. At the time, standard military doctrine was that the mounted, armoured knight was the ultimate weapon on the field. However, since plate and chain mail was ineffective against the bodkin arrows used by longbowmen, the first several battles resulted in the English obliterating the French. Instead of fixing the mistakes they were making, the French continued to employ the mass assault and the all-out charge. Since the average longbowmen could put around 3-5 arrows in the air before the first reached its target, this always resulted in the French being slaughtered long before they could even shoot back.

I just hope that Darwin’s laws of evolution eliminates the current round of idiots before their idiocy spreads. Not likely, I know, but we can always hope…

Another thing I love about the video I saw is that this student is another of the reformed. He says he used to be a liberal democrat who campaigned for Obama when Obama ran for senate. The student became a conservative when he became disenchanted with Obama’s actual voting record, AND, even more importantly, when he saw that he could ask critical questions of the right and get thoughtful answers, while always being rebuffed by the left, in the manner Barney Frank so brilliantly displays here.

There are more and more reformed liberal democrats. Someone should be keeping a list. It is heartening to see.

What bothered me most about the video clip were the idiots in the audience laughing at the kid as if Frank had made a point.Frank sounded like a drunk at a bar. The student was polite as he made his very valid points and didn’t seem to be affected by all of Frank’s bluster!

Frank blamed the GOP for doing nothing through till 2006, but the Bush WH first started trying to rein in Fannie/Freddie in 2003. Here’s what Frank said in response to the WH initiative:

“These two entitiesâ€”Fannie Mae and Freddie Macâ€”are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

And of course let us not forget the corruption at Fannie/Freddie by Raines et all between 1999 and 2004, while Frank sat on the committee that oversaw the companies.

The student at Harvard should have been better prepared and just read out this quote.

Though from all the laughter in support of Frank at Harvard I’m not sure any reasonable argument could be made to penetrate the minds of the learned faculty.

They can’t even open the door to their responsibility, to do so would cause their entire ideological “de-regulation” caused this argument to fall apart. Look at the relaxing of mark to market last week, essentially they loosened regulations on the financial houses and there was no discussion or complaints by congress, to do so would have demolished the lefts conventional wisdom.

Thanks, Blarney Frank, for reminding me why I moved the hell out of Massachusetts 20 years ago. That Cambridge blowhard has worked assiduously to set this country up for either bankruptcy or hyperinflation.

If there’s any comfort in this, at least be assured that it’s going to happen in Barney’s lifetime. In fact, given the blockheadedness of the typical Massachusetts voter, he’ll still be a Congressman about the time the dollar’s value drops to, oh, 6 cents.

If we start mounting a grassroots campaign now, we should have enough momentum by then to be able to get Washington’s portrait removed from the dollar bill, and substitute Frank’s in its place. These dollars will come on perforated rolls, of course, like toilet paper.

And as the Canadians call their dollar coin the “Loonie,” after the picture of a loon stamped on it, we’ll be justified in calling our new devalued dollars “Barneys” while we tear off a few for the morning BM.

In the interest of “address[-ing] substance” and avoiding “ideological attacks”…

Instead of even considering if he had made errors of [sic] the years*, Barney rambles on about a â€œsystematic right-wing attack to try and divert the blame for the deregulation.â€ … He doesnâ€™t acknowledge his own failure to support (indeed, his active opposition to) increased regulation of the GSEs.

It’s really weird for you to claim that he didn’t admit to mistakes, since just a few paragraphs earlier you acknowledge he admitted to doing so, if “only once.” Frank says he wrongly backed off reforming hedge funds. Agree or disagree, it’s a substantive admission.

Furthermore, the idea that Frank “doesnâ€™t acknowledge his own failure to support (indeed, his active opposition to) increased regulation of the GSEs” is so wrong it’s almost comical. If you watched the video, you would have heard Frank describe the bill (the Federal Housing Reform Act of 2007 [H.R. 1427]) that he passed, with Republican support, to increase regulation of GSEs in 2007 (the Congressman explains it further here, though if you have any substantive rebuttal I’d be glad to hear it).

You link to the video, but then you tell complete falsehoods about what is depicted in the video. Did you assume you wouldn’t be called on it? So much for “substance.”

And yet the voters in his district keeping sending him back and back and back and back. No matter how arrogant or corrupt Frank is, the liberal Democrat voters in his district will keep reelecting him and there is nothing the rest of us can do about it. What would Frank have to do to get the voters of Massachusetts to stop afflicting him upon the rest of us? When it comes time to assign blame for the decline of this country we shouldn’t be looking at Frank, we should be looking at the people who kept sending him back.

You don’t get it. Rep. Frank is a liberal and hence better and smarter than the common people. He cares. So any question of him has to be a unfair and possibly homophobic attack. You need to understand he cares about us lackeys and therefore can not be questioned by us little people.

Next thing you’ll think the money you earn is really yours! Bow respectfully to your masters and shut up now like a good peasant.

The Barney Franks of the world don’t even entertain the possibility that anything they did played a role in all of this. It’s just a fact-beyond-question that we’re where we’re at because of deregulation — period, end of story.

Of course he won’t engage critics. He has nothing to engage them with. The same thing happened on O’Reilly’s show when O’Reilly challenged Rep. Frank to “be man enough” to admit his own role in pumping up the subprime housing sector and resisting reform of the GSEs.

Frank simply brushed this comment aside as a slight against his sexual orientation — when that had nothing whatsoever to do with what O’Reilly said.

The left has gone from saying that Gramm-Leach-Bliley did this (which always was a ridiculous charge — the vast majority of the troubled firms didn’t even take advantage of the vertical integration allowed by the law) to saying that the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 was the culprit.

But this is just as spurious — particularly if the aim is to place the blame on Republicans (as this particular amendment was supported by all but 9 House Democrats and passed with unanimous consent in the Senate). Beyond that, the chief criticism of this law was the “Enron Loophole” which exempted OTC energy trades — which may be a fair enough criticism, but it played no role in any of this.

Thus far, the best layman-level primer I’ve seen on the financial meltdown has Stanford economist John B. Taylor’s little handbook “Getting Off Track.” I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to gain a real understanding of all the factors which played into this — written from a decidedly apolitical point of view.

Dr. Taylor has plenty of scorn for the private-sector financial services industry, the social engineers like Frank, and an overactive Fed.

Of course, one is right to call Frank a bully, but you have to give the devil his due. Frank has developed perfect pitch for hearing the word or phrase which he can use turn the argument back on the “accuser” and box him into taking the defense.

One of the reasons “formal debate” rules were established is because of people who had honed the art of verbal thrust and parry to avoid the essence of the debate.

The Harvard student walked straight into Frank’s open jaws. He asked a rhetorical question and he got steamrollered in the answer. Vintage Frank. You see it every time the man is attacked.

Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the rest of the Democrats will never acknowledge the central role they played in the financial meltdown. And why should they? They have the MSM in their pocket, they have a substantial portion of the population still staring in an adoring and Zen-like fashion at Obama and full control of our government.

It’s up to the conservative bloggers, like Gay Patriot and so many others to keep up the fight for the truth. God bless you all.

Frank often resorts to this tactic but even though he was quite obnoxious in this clip – the audience was even worse. What kind of person(s) cheers as a politician bullys a student? It was also a bit much to hear Frank accuse the student of being disingenuous; I think most people watching this exchange would say Frank was the one being disingenuous.

Frank and the Democrats insisted that people who could not and cannot pay back loans nevertheless recieve the loans. HE PANDERED TO A VOTING BLOCK.
Upon being warned about the impending disaster of FANNIE AND FREDDIE, Frank denied any problems and slept with a gay exec of Freddie who was earning MILLIONS and MILLIONS that we had to bail out.
Meanwhile Maxine Waters said questioning Franklin Raines was a lynching.
The simple answer here is that Liberals are just dishonest.
A convincing lie, a bullying lie and a well told re-told lie is nevertheless a lie.
And Frank is a liar,.
So natrually, I am a homophobe or someother non-existant PHOBE.

Dan, returning to the subject for a second, as much as I dislike -no, loathe- BarneyFrank, I doubt that the reason he enjoys the farLeft’s support has anything to do with that group’s narrowmindedness or practiced politics of personal destruction as a method of operation.

You offer “No wonder the unhappy Mr. Frank is such a hero to the left. Just like all too many of our critics who ignore the points of our posts and attack us instead, the mean-spirited man from Massachusetts ignores the question, accuses the person posing it and goes on a tear against the â€œright-wing.â€”

I’d offer that Frank (or Sharpton or Jackson) is a hero to the farLeft because, just like many of their counterparts on the farRight, they are strong, unflinching (or in Barney’s case is that un-feltching?) advocates and get to go to the front of the line. The more outrageous, the more passionate, the more vitriolic, the better for some. I think that’s why politico-entertainers (new phrase) like RushBlow, Beck, Coulter, OReilly, Maher, HerrOlbermann, Stewart and Colbert have such ardent defenders. Listening to their “peoples” defend them is like watching a muscle-worship video while pumping plates or hitting the stairmaster… feed that emotion, feed that passion, motivate.

eeSchattschneider coined a concept in the 1940s that the farLeft (then) and the farRight could be represented on a circle of political continuum where a single anti-democratic action united them in character –he used the willingness to resort to violence to advance their political agenda. Others have used other anti-democratic actions to show how the farLeft and farRight still aren’t all that far apart on political methodology.

I think it’s more accurate to look at BarneyFrank’s reaction to anyone questioning whether or not he made mistakes the same way that Bush 43 reacted when asked if he regretted his mistakes… he didn’t make any. I admire Bush greatly, but Barney is only guilty of being equally ego-centric and unwilling to admit mistakes as the last prez.

And his defenders support him just like RushBlow’s and other politico-entertainers pandering to the farRight have their supoorters here and elsewhere.

Really, it’s no different.

It’s just their devil on the spit for now. We’ve had our own on the spit for a long time. And neither side is learning much.

Tape Doesn’t Lie, thanks for your criticism and noting the typo, since corrected. First note that in the passage you quote from my post, I say that Barney doesn’t acknowledge his failure to support reform of the GSEs.

Please note I used that expression, “over the years” (wherein there was initially a typo) to reference his repeated opposition to substantive reform of the GSEs over a long period of my time. In my first post on this matter, I did acknowledge that he mentioned that reform bill, writing:

To his credit, Frank did acknowledge the Fannie Mae reforms he helped pass in March 2007, but doesnâ€™t address his efforts to thwart earlier Republican-sponsored reforms of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) when it might have made a difference.

From the 1990s (at least) through 2007, he actively supported the policies and regularly opposed reform of the GSEs.

Given that I linked that post in this one, I didn’t think it necessary to reference what I had already said. And Barney never considers that that reform was too late to forestall the crisis as many suggest it was.

As to the error he admitted, note how he says he had wanted to do the “right thing,” but someone talked him out of it. So, no, I don’t tell falsehoods. He sought to pass the blame to Republicans, pass off his one mistake and refuse to acknowledge how he had repeatedly misrepresented the financial health of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It is his general attitude I address. He has a record of over a decade of active opposition to reform of Fannie and Freddie. He doesn’t touch on that, When he mentions the 2007 reform, he had a prime opportunity to say, “We should have addressed this sooner and I was wrong to block previous reforms.”

Barney has a whole history of opposing reform which he ignores. And repeatedly blames Republicans.

Sigh. The CRA is intimately related to the Fannie and Freddie losses, as that was the act which led to increasing loans among low-income people. This is what the right is pushing as the “reason” for the financial/credit crisis. You’ve done it again, unsourced, in your post above: … Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) whose failure sparked the financial meltdown.
No, they didn’t. Fannie and Freddie did not cause the financial meltdown. Prove it with a link, and not something you heard on Hannity or absorbed from the right-wing blogosphere. I’ve already disproved it with my link yesterday, so we have right wing fantasies 0, proof 1.
This was also the reason for Barney’s question back to the kid (“and asks him to suggest what he, the Congressman, should have done.“) because he knows the kid probably doesn’t know anything besides “I heard Barney Frank is to blame for Fannie and Freddie/financial crisis/the fall of man” (kinda like you), but when pressed for details, couldn’t offer any. You need a sinister reason for returning the question, so you play armchair psychologist with your “suggests a man who rarely, if at all, engages in any sort of introspection, rarely considers if he had done anything wrong.” Right. Because the only reason to ask someone to back up their baseless claims against you is a lack of self-examination.

I’ve been told forever that the Dems are the party of the people. And here we have Smarmy verbally attacking a young student who asked him a legitimate question.

Kudos to that kid, articulate, calm. And yes, I’m proud to see more young Jews who are conservative. Sure he’s Orthodox in his religion, note the kippah, but he stated clearly that he is politically conservative.

On another note, you’d think with the left winning everything in our country this election they’d stop being so angry and nasty. Guess it’s just part of who they are – can’t let that anger go.

I think that we’ve missed the major ‘point’ of the exchange captured in the video. An extremely powerful member of government basically tried to demonize and crush a powerless citizen who only asked an insightful question. It goes beyond arrogance to tyrany. It really reminded me of the whole “Joe the Plumber” scenario, where a citizen asking a question was attacked and demonized.

How far down this road are we going? My DW’s parents escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, and her Mom tells us this all seems terrifyingly familiar. Mom lived under Communism, and certainly doesn’t want us going down that road.

To the original post, Barney is popular because he’s able to go from bully to martyr is less time than it takes for President Obama to answer a question w/o a teleprompter. Thus he plays on the emotions of the left, and their feelings of self vindication. Logic never enters into it.

Rep. Barney Frank has defended his involvement in the financial crisis with a good offense, blaming Bush, Republicans, and the free-market (regulated in detail by Barney Frank). In fact, Frank was a primary designer and advocate of the bad-loan policies that have brought us crisis.

The government found a way to spend as much as it wanted, by guaranteeing the debts of the off-budget government agencies (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The current bailouts and huge budgets continue to serve the self-interest of politicians and government aligned groups.

Fannie Maeâ€™s changes will include allowing borrowers seeking to take out a loan that is 80 percent of the value of the home or less to qualify for refinancing with credit scores below its 580 minimum. Consumer credit scores as measured by Fair Isaac Corp. range from 300 to 850.

The program also lowers income-documentation requirements to one current pay stub, according to the notice.

So in other words, even as Fag and his leftist cronies like torrentprime shriek about “regulation” and “lax standards”, they’re lowering them even farther at their government-controlled mortgage company.

And the fact that torrentprime is lying through his teeth to protect Barney Fag is shown quite nicely by this article.

Money quotes:

To keep profits aloft and meet affordable-housing goals set by Congress, the companies began buying huge numbers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, the highly profitable loans often taken out by low-income and riskier borrowers. By the end of last year, the companies had guaranteed or invested in $717 billion of subprime and Alt-A loans, up from almost none in 2000.

An even better:

Despite those troubles, lawmakers had few alternatives to asking Fannie and Freddie to buy more and riskier mortgages.

â€œI want these companies to help with affordable housing, to help low-income families get loans and to help clean up this subprime mess,â€ said Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. â€œOtherwise, why should they exist?â€

Do you see that, torrentprime? Your Barney Fag, who insists he never pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and who insists they were never invested in subprime or bad mortgages is lying to your face.

But you can’t admit that, because you’re a gay-sex liberal. You have to defend Fag because he’s gay. Don’t you have enough pride and self-esteem to admit that Fag lied to you?

Anyone who expects a politician to admit to error or take responsibility for same is just howling in the wind. There’s a reason Democrats hounded Bush for such admissions, and there’s a reason he refused to offer them. It’s like voluntarily drinking political hemlock.

Rather than asking Barney Frank to assess his own responsibility in the meltdown, our brave student would have been better advised to ask Frank to explain his vote on a specific question, or to defend one of those illustrative statements we’ve all seen on web videos. Major props to him for the effort though! It’s a crying shame that the Republicans who should have been conspicuously leading such a charge have been in such short supply.

What struck me was that Frank defended himself by citing his efforts to regulate hedge funds — which probably had less to do with the economic crisis than practically any other financial entities.

Barney Frank is a typical long term, frequently re elected with 70 % of the vote, polititian. You get a big head. You think you are king or at the very least a prince. Barney has this debating skill, that when asked a tough question, one that he really can’t defend, he will frequently start to fillibuster and bring in other tangent facts. When asked to focus by the moderator, he screams, “don’t interrupt, let me finish my answer. “Thus posing as the affronted party. When Republicans tried to re regulate Fannie back in 2005 and 2006, they didn’t have the votes to overcome a fillibuster proof majority in Congress. Barney says if Republicans were serious, why didn’t they reregulate when they “controlled” Congress and the White House. That’s like saying if Bush wanted more conservative judges, why didn’t he appoint them when he had a Republican Congress. But Barney knows most Americans don’t pay close attention. When he says “if Republicans were serious, why didn’t they reregulate when they “controlled” Congress and the White House….the average Joe, goes…hmm yeah. And Barney smiles. And he’s won. Politics over Country.

31 Doug J I think that weâ€™ve missed the major â€˜pointâ€™ of the exchange captured in the video. An extremely powerful member of government basically tried to demonize and crush a powerless citizen who only asked an insightful question

I think you’ re right on the money here. A polititian, who out of mere politeness would thoughtfully engage the student, and have a dialogue. The trouble is Barney is smart enough to know he is very vulnerable on this topic. The student had gutts to stand up and ask the question, putting the pol on the spot. Experienced polititians now adays I think want to embarrase such questioners hoping to end the practice. Fox News reporters, Joe the plumber as mentioned earlier. If attacked hard and often enough are suppoe to learn their lesson and just ask the softball vanilla questions like everyone from NBC.

Keep the blinders on conservatives cuase you guys are heading into a lake. The kid was trying to make Barney Frank look bad and basiclly trying to corner him in answering a yes or no question without looking whole picture. That’s the thing with Conservatives, there’s only black and white. Maybe things are a lot more complicated and there is not just one way of looking it.

#42: Bullsh*t, Leysin. Things only become “complicated” for liberals when they are desperately trying to conceal and blame others for their well-documented, perfectly simple, corruption and incompetence. Of course, when a Republican is in charge, liberals like you suddenly decide that nothing is more complicated than a slogan or cliche that can fit on a bumper sticker: War for Oil; Bush Lied, Kids Died; Bush Wiretaps “Shredded the Constitution”; Cowboy Diplomacy; Shoot First, Ask Questions Later; Gitmo’s Kangaroo Court. For liberals, every detail and nuance is out the window when there’s a Republican to blame or demonize, so please, take your bitching about “black and white” absolutes and cram it.

So things are all black and white??? Are you trying to say that the issues the country is facing today can by answered with a simple yes or no? I’m not a liberal or a democrat or leftest or whatever scary label you want to put on people that opposes your view. I think for myself and I’m thinking that your a loon, coo coo for coco puffs. Have fun stock pile your weapons and teabag america.. sounds like loads of fun.

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